Frazz by Jef Mallett for September 02, 2012

Flip that ceramic chicken

In B-school you can learn how to re-brand it as something more desirable. Or learn a better valuation model so that you don’t try to make money on ceramic chickens in the first place.

Call it an antique!…

And, Frazz, come on, you do songwriting for a living,…You do labor to occupy your time.

an early “Helloooo” to SusanSunshine …drop a line at the usual email address sometime!

No, but it does cause inflation, and false “booms” that inevitably collapse.

I hate to break it to the kid, but the market has already spoken on his ceramic chicken.

Moneylenders have always been considered a ‘necessary evil’ in society. In one breath we express hatred and contempt and in the next we’re asking for a loan so we can buy something now without having the means to buy it outright. Why don’t we just save up and buy it then? Because we put a value on the use of something today which is as high or higher than the finance cost tomorrow. Look at the HBO show ‘Too Big to Fail’. What precipitated the original bail out was that the chairman of GE called the Treasury Secretary and said that all the lending markets had dried up and he could not continue day to day operations. So life is just a little more complicated than a simple case of ‘making money off money’. And why don’t we just put our savings in a pillow? Because if we can’t get at least a return at the rate of inflation, it will all be eaten up over the years. We maintain if not grow with investments. Oh, and business schools stopped including ethics years ago. Why? I suppose they thought it was a basic human trait. Were they ever wrong!

A born salesman!